Israel had to tip off American intelligence about a new Iranian plot to assassinate President Trump — because our own spy agencies weren't tracking it. The same intelligence community that burned through billions lying about Iraqi WMDs and spying on American citizens needed a foreign government to warn it that a hostile regime is hunting the president of the United States.

That is the staggering implication of a Wall Street Journal report, confirmed by CNN: the specific Iranian threat against Trump was not on the radar of U.S. officials before Israel's warning earlier this week, and has yet to be vetted by American intelligence. The president of the United States learned he was on an enemy kill list from another country's spies — not from the sprawling apparatus that is supposed to protect him.

Trump confirmed the threat Wednesday at the NATO summit in Ankara. "They want to take out the U.S. leader — me," the president said. "I'm on whatever list. I saw this morning I'm on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I've been a bit lucky, but maybe that doesn't last very long." He added: "These are evil, sick people. And we have to root out that cancer. That cancer. You know what you do? You've got to cut out cancer early."

The threat is real enough that the White House took extraordinary precautions. Trump traveled to Turkey on his new Qatari-donated "palace in the sky" aircraft but took a different Air Force One home — a switch the White House called a strategic "distraction" to protect the commander-in-chief. War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who accompanied Trump to the summit, was told not to proceed with a planned trip to Israel. It's unclear whether the Iranian threat extended to Hegseth, and the Journal report provided no details on the plot itself.

The Iranian regime is not hiding its intentions. At Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's funeral procession this week — crowds that regime-friendly outlets claim reached 30 million, a figure HotAir rightly flagged as almost certainly inflated — banners in English read "WE WILL KILL TRUMP." Crowds chanted: "I swear by the blood of the Supreme Leader, Trump, we will kill you!" The IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency released a video promoting a petition to sign up to kill the American president. The regime is advertising the hit.

Khamenei was killed on the first day of the Iran war, and the funeral has dragged on for nearly a week, culminating Thursday in the holy city of Mashhad. In a telling detail, Khamenei's successor — his son Mojtaba — has not appeared in public even once since the February strike that killed his father. Mostafa Khamenei, the eldest son, led the funeral prayer instead. If the new supreme leader is afraid to show his face at his own father's burial, the regime's bark may outpace its bite.

Meanwhile, U.S. forces have struck roughly 170 Iranian targets in the past two days, according to the U.S. military. Iran's retaliatory strikes on American bases across the Middle East have been relatively few and largely intercepted. The military exchange is lopsided.

Trump's relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has grown strained amid the war. On June 1, Trump told Netanyahu he was "f–king crazy" over his attacks on Lebanon, fearing they would provoke wider conflict with Iran. "You'd be in prison if it weren't for me. I'm saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this," a U.S. official summarized Trump's comments, which the president later confirmed to the New York Post.

The New York Post framed the story around the Israeli intelligence tip and Trump's NATO remarks. HotAir led with the funeral spectacle and the regime's propaganda, burying the intelligence failure deeper. Both outlets missed the obvious question: if Israel can spot an Iranian assassination plot before our own agencies can, what exactly are those agencies doing with their budget — and how many other threats are sailing through the same blind spot?